Jean Khoury

Abstract: The first commandment — ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your meʾōd’ (Deuteronomy 6:5) — is not a simple moral precept among others. It is the very form of the covenant, the required human response to a divine love that is itself absolute, desirous, and without reserve. This article undertakes a close reading of the Hebrew vocabulary of the Shema, and in particular of the final and decisive term meʾōd — normally an adverb meaning ‘exceedingly,’ here substantivised to denote a love without measure. Beginning with the biblical portrait of God’s own passionate desire (ḥāshaq, qannāʾ, the divine ‘thirst’ that runs from Hosea through to John 19:28), the article argues that meʾōd names both the quality and the totality of the human response this divine love demands: not moderate fidelity, but extravagant, undivided, consuming love. Drawing on the great mystics — Thérèse of Lisieux, John of the Cross, Teresa of Ávila, Catherine of Siena — it shows that their ‘excess’ is not a spiritual luxury reserved for contemplatives but the literal meaning of the first commandment, written into the Hebrew text itself. Lukewarmness is not merely a moral imperfection; it is a theological contradiction. The article concludes that the discovery of God’s passionate desire for us is the only true foundation of the love he commands.

Introduction: A Commandment That Demands Everything

There is a temptation, in the history of Christian moral teaching, to read the commandments as a list of obligations — precepts to be observed, sins to be avoided, a legal framework mediating the relationship between a sovereign God and his subjects. The first commandment, taken in isolation, appears to confirm this reading: ‘You shall love.’ A command. An imperative. As though love could be legislated.

But this reading misses everything. It misses the logic of the text, the weight of the Hebrew vocabulary, and above all the prior reality that the commandment presupposes: the love of God himself, which is not moderate, not measured, and not cold.

This article proposes to read the first commandment from within — from within the Hebrew text, from within the biblical narrative of covenant and desire, and from within the tradition of the great mystics who lived it most completely. Its central claim is this: the first commandment is not a moderate moral programme. It is a call to total, undivided, and even extravagant love, a love that mirrors and responds to the passionate desire of God himself. The key to this reading is a single Hebrew word, placed at the end of the commandment as both a culmination and a programme: מְאֹד, meʾōd.

I. God Loves First — and He Loves Without Measure

The Priority of Divine Initiative

Before the first commandment can be understood, one must hear what precedes it. The structure of biblical revelation is not: ‘Here are the rules; now love accordingly.’ It is: ‘I have loved you. Now live in response to this love.’

This structure is already present at Sinai. Before God opens his mouth to pronounce any commandment, he says:

אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךְ אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם     ʾānōkî YHWH ʾelōhekā ʾasher hôṣeʾtîkā mēʾereṣ miṣrayim “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2)

The act of liberation precedes the law. The commandments are not conditions to merit God’s love; they are the response to a love already freely given. The logical sequence is decisive: God loves first, he liberates, he chooses and only then does he say: respond to this love. This is why the New Testament can state, as the simple unfolding of what the Old Testament already contains: ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19).

God’s Desire: ḥāshaq and the Vocabulary of Divine Passion

The biblical portrait of God’s love is not that of a serene and unmoved benefactor. It is marked, from the beginning, by desire, attachment, and what the text itself does not hesitate to name as an almost wounded intensity.

Deuteronomy 7:7–8 is one of the most revealing passages. Moses addresses the people: ‘It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you.’

The verb behind ‘set his love on’ is חָשַׁק (ḥāshaq). This is not a routine verb of beneficent will. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament defines it as ‘to be attached to, to delight in, to love with strong feeling.’ It appears in Deuteronomy 10:15 again: ‘Yet the Lord set his heart in love (ḥāshaq) on your fathers.’ It is the language of a love that binds itself, that fastens onto its object with personal intensity.

The prophets radicalise this portrait. In Hosea 11:8–9, one of the most extraordinary passages in all of Scripture, God cries out: ‘My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.’

The Hebrew is almost shocking: נֶהְפַּךְ עָלַי לִבִּי — ‘my heart is turned over within me.’ God is portrayed as internally moved, as one overturned by love. This is not a theological abstraction; it is revealed language that does not hesitate before the mystery of divine affectivity. As Walter Brueggemann observes: ‘Hosea attributes to Yahweh a deep emotional agitation in relation to his people.’

Jeremiah 31:20 continues in the same register: ‘My heart yearns for him (hāmāh); I will surely have mercy on him.’ The verb hāmāh means to be stirred, to be in turmoil: not impassive governance, but a love that is shaken by the absence of the beloved.

And in Isaiah 62:5, the register shifts into the nuptial key that the whole prophetic tradition sustains: ‘As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.’ The verb śûś denotes exultation, jubilation. This is not calm benevolence. It is delight, a love that finds joy in its object.

The Divine Thirst: From the Old Testament to John 19:28

All of this reaches its climax in the New Testament, in a single word spoken from the Cross: ‘I thirst’ (John 19:28). The Church’s tradition, and the saints above all, have never read this as merely physical. Thérèse of Lisieux heard in it the thirst of Jesus for souls, for love, for the gift of the human person to God. Mother Teresa built her entire mission around this word, placing it at the centre of every chapel of the Missionaries of Charity. And what she heard, she had heard from Scripture — for the Old Testament had already said it, in its own way. In Isaiah 5:1–4, God sings the ‘song of the vineyard.’ He planted it, tended it, waited for it — ‘and he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.’ The whole passage is structured around disappointed desire. God is portrayed as one who has hoped, waited, thirsted for a return of love.

Raymond Brown, commenting on John 19:28, notes: ‘The phrase suggests both the end of physical life and the fullest extent of love.’ Εἰς τέλος — ‘to the end,’ ‘to the utmost’ — is the Johannine formula at the opening of the Passion narrative (John 13:1): ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’ This is the definitive revelation of what was already present in seed in the Hebrew Scriptures: a love that does not stop short, that does not measure itself, that gives everything.

Jealousy, Zeal, and the Exclusivity of Love

Within the Decalogue itself, God names the quality of his own love in a startling way: ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exodus 20:5). The Hebrew word is קַנָּא (qannāʾ). As the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament notes: ‘Divine jealousy is modelled on the exclusiveness of marriage — it implies ardour, intolerance of rivals, and passionate fidelity.’

This is not insecurity. It is the structure of love. Love that accepts rivals is not love; it is indifference. The God who says ‘I am jealous’ is the God who has given himself entirely, and who therefore cannot be received partially.

The human response to this is named in Numbers 25:11, where Phinehas is praised for acting with God’s own zeal — qinʾāh. The term connects divine passion and human religious fervour in a single vocabulary. Zeal, in this register, is not fanaticism; it is the experiential form of loving God without rival.

II. The Shema and the Grammar of Total Love

The Context of the Commandment

The commandment to love does not arrive in a void. It is preceded, in Deuteronomy 6:4, by the Shema: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד     Shemaʿ Yisrāʾēl YHWH ʾElōhênû YHWH ʾeḥād     “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”

Read as a theological proclamation, the Shema asserts the unity and exclusivity of YHWH. But it says something more. YHWH ʾElōhênû: ‘the Lord is our God.’ Before the commandment to love is uttered, God has already given himself as ours. The possessive is a declaration of belonging. And YHWH ʾeḥād, ‘the Lord is one,’ but also: the Lord is unique, the Lord is the only one. As one says to a beloved: you alone. The commandment to love therefore arrives as the natural answer to a declaration already made: I am yours.

The Three Terms and Their Weight

The commandment itself reads:

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ

בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ     bekol lebābkā     “with all your heart”

וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ     ûbekol napshekā     “with all your soul”

וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ     ûbekol meʾōdekā     “with all your meʾōd”

The verb אָהַב (ʾāhab) is not a weak or merely volitional term. It is the ordinary verb for human love in all its affective density, including conjugal love. In Genesis 29:20, Jacob’s seven years of labour for Rachel ‘seemed to him but a few days because of the love (ʾāhab) he had for her.’ The same verb governs the commandment. This already situates it within a register that includes desire and personal attachment, not mere obedience.

The first term, לֵבָב (lēbāb), designates the inner core of the person — not primarily emotion, but the seat of decision, will, and intelligence. To love ‘with all your lēbāb’ means to love without inner division. The Mishnah (Berakhot 9:5) already perceived this, commenting on the doubled form of the word: ‘with both your inclinations’ — that is, even the inclination that resists must be turned toward God.

The second term, נֶפֶשׁ (nefesh), is not the Greek soul as a detachable spiritual substance. It is the living being in its totality, the life-breath, the desiring self. To love ‘with all your nefesh’ means to love to the very depths of one’s existence, even unto life itself. The Sifre on Deuteronomy draws out the implication: ‘Even if He takes your soul.’ This is not metaphor; it is the logic of love that holds nothing back.

III. Meʾōd — The Refusal of Measure

The Word and Its First Appearance

The decisive term is the third: מְאֹד (meʾōd). And it is here that the commandment reaches its most radical register.

Meʾōd enters Scripture in Genesis 1:31. God surveys everything he has made and judges it טוֹב מְאֹד — ‘very good.’ The word does not add a qualification to ‘good’; it pushes goodness to its highest degree, to a kind of overflow. The addition of meʾōd does not simply increase quantity; it signals plenitude, a goodness that goes beyond.

Throughout Genesis and the entire Torah, this adverb functions as an intensifier that takes a reality to its extreme. The doubling meʾōd meʾōd (Genesis 17:2, 17:6) — ‘very, very’ — is the Hebrew way of saying: beyond any further measure. It is hyperbole in the service of reality, pushing language to the frontier where words become inadequate.

The Grammatical Anomaly and Its Significance

What happens in Deuteronomy 6:5 is linguistically singular. Meʾōd, normally an adverb, is here used as a noun, with the possessive suffix: מְאֹדֶךָ, ‘your meʾōd.’ As the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament notes: ‘The מאד, normally an adverb, is here used substantively to denote the totality of a person’s powers and resources.’ One can only approximate the force of this: ‘with all your very-ness,’ ‘with all your utmost,’ ‘with all that pushes you beyond yourself.’

This grammatical shift is not accidental. What is usually a degree becomes a domain. The commandment does not merely specify three faculties of the person (heart, soul, strength). It culminates in a term that introduces intensity beyond totality, not simply ‘everything,’ but ‘everything carried to its utmost degree.’

Peter Craigie’s commentary captures this precisely: ‘The third term functions not as a faculty alongside the others but as an intensifier of the whole command. The love demanded is not merely complete; it is intense beyond measure.’

Jewish exegetical tradition perceived this from the beginning. Rashi expands meʾōd to include material resources — nothing one possesses is held back. The Sifre presses it further: ‘with every measure that He measures out to you’ — meaning, in every circumstance, without reserve, under every condition of life.

Meʾōd and the Structure of the Commandment

The commandment builds cumulatively. The first two terms — heart and nefesh — already establish totality: nothing held back in the will and intelligence, nothing held back in the living self. The third term does not add a third piece to this totality; it adds the demand that this totality be carried without limit.

This is the structure of nuptial love. One can speak of complete fidelity, but one cannot speak of measured passion. The Song of Songs expresses the same logic: ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’ (Song 8:7). Love, in its authentic form, is not moderate; it is indestructible, unmeasurable, excessive — not in a pathological sense, but in the sense that it transcends every economy of exchange.

Meʾōd, placed at the culmination of the first commandment, names this transcendence of measure as the demanded form of the human response to God. It is not an invitation to emotional excess. It is a structural demand: the whole person, at the highest intensity of which it is capable, turned entirely toward God.

IV. Meʾōd in the Life of the Soul: The Mystics as Witnesses

Thérèse of Lisieux and the Discovery of God’s Thirst

On 9 June 1895, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Thérèse of Lisieux received what she herself called a decisive grace: the discovery of God’s desire to love, compressed, as it were, within himself for lack of souls large enough to receive it. The image was there before this grace but also developed in the months that followed — the ‘beggar of love’ (mendiant d’amour) — expresses this with exact intuition.

Thérèse had understood that God’s love, being infinite, is not exhausted in any partial reception. It presses perpetually toward the one who will consent to receive it without limit. Her act of oblation to Merciful Love — offering herself as a holocaust, a capacity, a vessel — is not spiritual heroism. It is the literal response to the commandment: with all your meʾōd. Hold nothing back. Become nothing but receptivity.

The floods of divine love she described afterwards correspond exactly to what Psalm 36:8 already promised: ‘You give them drink from the river of your delights.’ The flood was not new; she had become the capacity for it.

See: Act of Oblation of St. Therese

John of the Cross: Equality in Love

John of the Cross addresses from a different angle the same mystery that meʾōd encodes. In the Living Flame of Love, he writes that the soul, in the highest degree of union, ‘gives God to God’ in God himself. This remarkable formula unpacks a logic that is already latent in Deuteronomy 6:5.

The soul cannot love God with an infinite love from its own resources. But the Holy Spirit has been poured into the heart (Romans 5:5). The soul, receiving the Spirit, being transformed in the Holy Spirit, receives God’s own love — and can therefore offer this love back to God. Thérèse echoes him and mentions the equality of love (Ms C). The commandment to love with all one’s meʾōd is thus not, in the end, a demand for human heroism; it is an invitation to allow divine love itself to become the form of one’s response.

John also articulates the logic of equality in love: love by its nature tends toward equality; it is not satisfied until the gift is matched by the gift. This is not a modern sentimentalism; it is a spiritual law with a biblical root. The one who gives everything, and receives everything, enters into a reciprocity that Scripture calls covenant and that the Song of Songs calls mutual possession: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’ (Song 2:16).

This mutual belonging — דּוֹדִי לִי וַאֲנִי לוֹ — is the experiential destination toward which meʾōd points. The commandment does not end in a moral achievement; it ends in a union. At the end of her life, Therese will say: “possessing him? I possess Him.”

Catherine of Siena: The Capacity and the Torrent

Catherine of Siena’s formulation is perhaps the most direct expression of the relationship between meʾōd and divine giving: ‘Make yourself a capacity and I will make myself a torrent.’ The word of the Lord as she received it names exactly what the commandment establishes: the human side (total openness, without reserve) and the divine side (abundance without measure).

The image recalls Psalm 81:10: ‘Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.’ And the widow’s oil in 2 Kings 4: the oil flows until there are no more vessels. The stopping point is not on God’s side. The divine torrent does not diminish; it is the availability of vessels that determines the extent of the gift.

This is the deepest meaning of meʾōd: not an emotional fever, but the removal of every interior limit on the gift of self. The person who loves God ‘with all their meʾōd’ has become a pure capacity — and therefore receives the fullness of what God desires to give.

The Saints’ Passion and the Question of Purification

It must be said, however, that meʾōd as lived experience does not begin in its purified form. The apostle Peter is the great scriptural witness to this. His declarations before the Passion — ‘I will lay down my life for you,’ ‘Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you’ — are already meʾōd in intention, an absolute gift in aspiration. But the love is mixed with self-trust, with illusion, with unmortified fervour.

The Cross does not dismiss this love; it purifies it. The same Peter who denies three times confesses three times (John 21), and is given a mission proportioned to the love that has now been truly tested. The trajectory of meʾōd is from human passionate intensity, through purification, to a love that is total because it is no longer fed by the self but by the Spirit.

This is why the mystics speak not of eliminating passion but of its transformation. St. Paul, St. John, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Claire of Assisi, St. Francis, St. Teresa of Ávila, St. John of the Cross, St. Thérèse — none of them counsel emotional indifference. They counsel the surrender of every other love, every other attachment, every partial allegiance, so that the whole capacity of the person is available for the one love that the commandment demands.

V. Lukewarmness as Theological Contradiction

If the above is correct, then lukewarmness is not a minor moral imperfection. It is a contradiction of the first commandment at its most fundamental level.

Revelation 3:16 expresses this with unusual bluntness: ‘Because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I will spit you out of my mouth.’ The image is strong, almost violent. But it corresponds to a simple theological logic: love that is partial denies what love is. A love kept at a safe temperature, managed so as not to go too far, is not a response to the prior love of God — it is a refusal of it.

The prophets already knew this in the language of adultery and idolatry. When Hosea describes Israel’s infidelity in terms of conjugal betrayal, he is not employing a rhetorical device. He is stating a structural truth: a love that admits rivals, that keeps options open, that does not go to its end, has already ceased to be the love the covenant demands.

And conversely: the saints who loved without reserve — Thérèse offering herself as a holocaust, John of the Cross writing from prison, Teresa of Calcutta holding to the divine thirst in forty years of spiritual darkness — were not unusual cases of religious intensity. They were living the first commandment literally. They had understood meʾōd.

Conclusion: The Discovery That Changes Everything

The first commandment, read in its Hebrew depth, is not a moderate moral programme. It is the most radical demand imaginable: the total gift of the self, without division, without reserve, without measure — meʾōd. But this demand is not first of all a law; it is a response.

Everything depends on the prior discovery. One must first hear, at the depths of one’s being, what Scripture proclaims: that the God who is Love (1 John 4:8) is himself marked by a desire for us that the biblical language does not hesitate to call thirst, passion, desire, jealousy — ḥāshaq, qannāʾ, the heart turned over within him, the bridegroom who rejoices over the bride. One must discover, as Thérèse discovered on 9 June 1895, that this love is pressing to be received, that the floods are real, that God is not indifferent to whether he is loved in return.

From within that discovery, and only from within it, the commandment takes on its full force. It is no longer experienced as an external obligation but as the only coherent response to a love that has given everything. The question then ceases to be ‘how much is required?’ and becomes: ‘how can I hold anything back?’

This is the spiritual logic of meʾōd. Open your mouth wide (Psalm 81:10). Return to me with all your heart (Joel 2:12). Make yourself a capacity, and I will make myself a torrent (Catherine of Siena). Offer yourself to Merciful Love, so that nothing resists the influx (Thérèse). Give God to God in God himself (John of the Cross).

All of this is one movement: the human person, grasped by the prior love of God, responding with all their heart, all their nefesh, all their meʾōd — until, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, they love with God’s own love, and the torrent flows without obstruction.

There are no other ways. Half-hearted love does not fulfil the first commandment. Not because God withdraws, but because love, by its nature, tends toward totality. And because the God who is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24) does not ask for a measured ration of warmth. He asks for everything — because he has given everything, and because he continues to thirst.

“The soul that wishes God to give Himself entirely to it must give itself entirely to Him, keeping nothing for itself.” (St. John of the Cross)

“He does not give Himself wholly until we give ourselves wholly” (Way of Perfection Es, 24.4).

“All the advices I have given you in this book have but one aim: that of giving ourselves totally to the Creator, of surrendering our will to Him, of detaching ourselves from creatures—and, as you will have understood, of the great importance of this…” (Way of Perfection Es, 55:3)

Notes

1. Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2001), s.v. חשק.

2. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), p. 303.

3. For the nuptial register of Isaiah 62:5 within the broader prophetic tradition, see Brevard Childs, Isaiah (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 511–514.

4. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI, Anchor Bible 29A (New York: Doubleday, 1970), pp. 908–909. On εἰς τέλος in John 13:1, see also Francis Moloney, The Gospel of John (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998), pp. 374–375.

5. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren, vol. XIII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), s.v. קנא.

6. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), s.v. אהב.

7. Mishnah Berakhot 9:5. See also Rashi, Commentary on Deuteronomy 6:5, who interprets the doubled form לְבָבְךָ as indicating the integration of both the good and evil inclination (yeṣer ha-ṭôb and yeṣer ha-raʿ) into the love of God.

8. Sifre Deuteronomy, §32 (on Deut 6:5). The full citation reads: ‘With all your nefesh — even if He takes your soul from you.’

9. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VIII (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), s.v. מאד. See also Peter Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 170: ‘The term meʾōd introduces totality to the utmost degree.’

10. Rashi, Commentary on Deuteronomy 6:5. Sifre Deuteronomy, §32.

11. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, stanza 3, §79 (trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross [Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991], p. 700). Thérèse of Lisieux cites John of the Cross frequently; for the specific reference to loving God with God’s own love, see her manuscript B (Manuscrit autobiographique B), written in September 1896.

Select Bibliography

Primary Sources

Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Koehler, Ludwig, and Walter Baumgartner. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001.

Thérèse of Lisieux. Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Translated by John Clarke. Washington DC: ICS Publications, 1996.

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Andersen, Francis I., and David Noel Freedman. Hosea. Anchor Bible 24. New York: Doubleday, 1980.

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Brown, Raymond E. The Gospel According to John XIII–XXI. Anchor Bible 29A. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Childs, Brevard S. Isaiah. Old Testament Library. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001.

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McConville, J. Gordon. Deuteronomy. Apollos Old Testament Commentary. Leicester: Apollos, 2002.

Moloney, Francis J. The Gospel of John. Sacra Pagina 4. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998.

von Rad, Gerhard. Deuteronomy: A Commentary. Old Testament Library. London: SCM Press, 1966.

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Patristic and Spiritual Sources

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by the English Dominican Province. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1920.

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Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997.

Catherine of Siena. The Dialogue. Translated by Suzanne Noffke. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.

von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. I: Seeing the Form. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982.

Author’s Note

The theological argument, positions, and judgements in this article are entirely the author’s own. The initial drafting of the text was produced with the assistance of AI (Claude, Anthropic), which the author has revised, directed, and integrated in accordance with his own scholarly and spiritual formation.